First Day 2008-2009 - Positivity is the word of the day!

Guess who's back for another school year. After a nice summer vacation that evaporated like drops of water on hot asphalt, I'm back. Today was the first day of school and it marked my first time starting the year as the school psychologist. My former supervisor is now in her new position at the high school full-time and I'm on my own now. I'm happy. This fresh start also features new digs. Not only did I get a new office, but I got new carpet and new paint on the walls. That was cool, although the new carpet was giving me a headache today, and I don't get headaches often so that had to be the reason.

Anyway, the mantra for today and for the rest of the school year is positivity. At first I was starting to feel apprehensive about the upcoming year. I've got a lot of new players to work with in my school. I've got parents requesting PPTs before the school year even started and the pressure of being the only one started to get to me. I started to wonder if I could pull this off. Would I have any ideas or strategies to offer? Would any of them work? Then I realized that I was thinking about this in the wrong manner. I need to look at these possible situations and these new cases as opportunities to gain experience and add strategies and ideas to my repertoire.

For some reason the negative vibes from teachers were really affecting me today. I was told to pay attention to 1st grade today because there are some new children there and some former kindergarteners with behavioral histories. I used to think that the new students had it rough, because we would get all this information about them before they enrolled: the IEP, the reports, the discipline records, and we would have this profile of the kid before we even met him or her. Now I feel sorry for the children who are already in my school and move up a grade the following year, because they don't always get the chance to make a fresh start. This is especially true when they move from one "negative" teacher to another one the following year. There's this kid who's classic ADHD. The kid can't sit still to save his life, and he's on meds. His kindergarten teacher last year had a hard time adjusting her own attitude towards the student. Now she's contaminated the attitude of the student's new teacher. When the first grade teacher walked into the conference room to talk to the support staff, the first words out of mouth were, "I had to talk to him 5 times this morning." She already wants something implemented for him. So much for an adjustment period. I could feel the negative vibes coming from her end of the hallway, but I refuse to be drawn in. I need to maintain a positive outlook, for my sanity's sake.

BBC